developed the concept ofaestheticsin its modern sense.Aisthesisin Greek
means simply“sensation.”Beginning from the idea that aesthetics is“the
science of sensory cognition”^6 in general (as opposed to“pure”mathematical
or logical thinking), Baumgarten went on under this heading to discuss what
he called“perfect sensate discourse,”^7 that is, discourse that merely by the
arrangement of its parts pleases the mind in the mere apprehension of it,
without regard for accuracy or correctness. Following this lead, the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries are then populated with sensibility-oriented
discussions of pleasure in both art and nature. Taxonomies of various kinds
of objects–both natural and artistic–that please (or horrify) in mere
apprehension were developed. The beautiful, the sublime, the grotesque,
and the pastoral, among others, were identified as occasions of distinct kinds
of emotionally powerful apprehensions. For most theorists, including Burke,
Kant, and Wordsworth, these experiences tend to fall into two very broad
classes: the beautiful, understood as harmonious, absorbing, and calming;
and the sublime, understood as unruly, awe-inspiring, and invigorating.^8
Experiences, however, prove to be things that it is particularly difficult to
describe and classify. As the metaphor of taste already suggests, one may try
to describe experiences as having qualitatively different phenomenological
“feels”or manners of felt presence to consciousness, just as, say, coffee and
vanilla feel different to the tongue and mind. Yet it proves difficult to identify
any phenomenologically distinct feel that is experienced by all suitably
attentive apprehenders of all works of art. The experience of reading Homer’s
Iliadseems not tofeelvery like the experience of looking at a Claude land-
scape or listening to a Mozart symphony, except in the sense that all these
experiences are in some way pleasing and absorbing. Different sensory
modalities are used for each of them, and different modes of attention are
required.
Hence theorists of art as what pleases in experience have tended instead to
focus either on distinct features of ourmanner of attendingto beautiful objects
in both art and nature or on distinct features of theobjectof art-relevant
(^6) Alexander Baumgarten,Aesthetica(1750), §1, cited in Beardsley,Aesthetics from Classical
Greece to the Present, p. 157.
(^7) Baumgarten,Aesthetica, §§3, 4, citedibid., p. 158.
(^8) For a discussion of these two types of experiences and their significance in Wordsworth’s
poetry, see Richard Eldridge,“Internal Transcendentalism: Wordsworth and‘A New
Condition of Philosophy,’”in Eldridge,Persistence of Romanticism, pp. 102–23.
Beauty and form 55